Ned Boulting has covered every Tour de France since 2003 for ITV. He will be blogging on this year's Tour for www.telegraph.co.uk.

Tour de France 2010: Risk Management. Life on the Tour

Well, I got here. I took off from Joburg just as Iniesta was popping Spain into the history books. I stopped off in London for an hour in Terminal 5. By the middle of the yesterday afternoon, I was swinging round in the back of our hire car heading into the mountains from Geneva.

Today, I rejoined the Tour. The usual rhythm. 200 kilometres of motorway preceded by 45 minutes of arseing around Morzine in the car, slamming into Gendarmes roadblocks, interrogating wholly unhelpful Tour officials, and trying to figure out how to get the hell out of there before the caravan publicitaire embarked on its hardly carbon neutral rampage through the Haute Savoie.

Arriving in Saint Jean de Maurienne, with my 8th accreditation swinging from my neck, I made my way through the vast TV compound, tripping over kilometres of interwoven cables, and breaking into my first salty sweat of the 2010 edition as I helped to cart the camera equipment up to the finish line. Old friends and familiar faces at every turn. Frankie Andrieu, the ex-Motorola rider, who works for the US TV network "Versus" as a reporter. A sarcastic greeting from Paul Sherwen, our commentator. A warm handshake Mike Tomolaris, the hosts of SBS Australia's coverage…they're all back for more.

The Tour gets under your skin like nothing else. People come back year on year. It's an annual reunion. A few members of the ITV team have decades of Tours under their belts. This is Gary Imlach's 20th. In Bordeaux, apparently, the race director Christian Prud'homme will be hanging a medal around his neck for long service. The Tour's good like that. It looks after its own.

After lunch, then, (served by the excellent Phillipe and Odette, French chefs from Forest Hill in South London) my first trip to the sweltering chemical toilets (it's in the mid 30's here again today). I was amused enough by the sign on the inside of the door to risk dropping my iPhone somewhere irretrievable in order to record it for posterity.

It made me chuckle. It made me feel at home. There's a whole world which operates in parallel to the Tour. It's a decent place to be and I've missed it.